Lighting An Interview: Finding the middle way

Lighting a set has evolved rapidly over the past few decades. With the emergence of high quality LED lights, smaller, more efficient, and cooler (literally) setups are possible.

At Cincinnati Social Media our approach to lighting is to stay streamlined, take up a minimal footprint, and get as creative as possible to create impactful frames.

Most of our works lies in the “middle ground”. Think corporate interviews, high-end social media, documentary style highlight video, social ads, etc. etc.

Key considerations for this work are: budget, time, and roi. Unlike commercial sets and big Hollywood productions with seemingly unlimited budgets, work in the “middle ground” requires quick-thinking and precision to generate the maximum impact & ROI for our clients.

Take for example, the most common production we do: 1-2 man crew, generating a mix of assets (photo, video, socials) on a tight timeline and a moderate budget. Often we will have to fly out with our kit which makes efficiency even more important.

How do we approach this situation? One of the decisions we made early on was to invest in Arri’s S60 LED panel because of the excellent balance of output, color rendition on skin, and quick setup times. Compared to setting up a booklight which is quite common, this approach offers more flexibility, smaller footprint, and requires less resources on set.

Another decision we made was to incorporate the Canon R5C into our kit with the Canon R3 as a B Camera. On days when time is limited and reframing and re-lighting is not an option the 8K RAW on a wide lens like the 35 VCM has proven to be an excellent option in the edit, offering lots of flexibility.

When we were asked by a marketing firm to produce a multi-cam podcast for a national event at the Ceaser’s in Las Vegas the ability to quickly grab the R3 from the sticks and take some stills of the team proved to valuable for the end-client’s social media.

This style of flexibility runs in our DNA. As more and more productions move towards a “hybrid” team, our ethos and business model allows us to quickly transition from high-end corporate shoot to generating socials to generating stills without much fuss, often in the same day.